Francesc Serracanta i Giravent Español Catalán
Born in Barcelona (Catalonia) on October 4, 1941, for more than fifty years I have been interested in Art Music. I'm saying this because I think that classical music corresponds to the music of a specific period. My interests are specially dedicated to symphonic music with contemporary artistic value. From my point of view, in the field of painting there is no such confusion. When we write about the great painters, we usually accept the Word "painting", meaning that it is Artistic Painting. In the music field, if we use the term "music", we assume that "music" includes both products with real artistic value as well as other tiny and degraded products of purely commercial use. For this reason the Latin American countries use the term Art Music.
My education has been in the field of the science, I studied a degree in Chemical Sciences at the University of Barcelona. Then, in combination with my work at the Laboratory of Catalana de Gas y Electricitat today Gas Natural Fenosa, I got a degree in Pharmacy.
But I needed something that these studies did not give me. It was lack of humanism. To compensate this absurdity I fancied the Music, attending Sunday morning concerts at the Palau de la Música and started buying LP that time, that was the beginning of my current collection.
Throughout my time working on my ever growing responsibility for the professional tasks I was assigned, I finished as Director of the Laboratory and I was not able to work in the music field. My relation with music was passive, ans I could only attend to concerts or by recordings.
After a voluntary early retirement, mainly due to the cuts in research, of which I disagreed because I felt that they were relegating me to office work devoted those bureaucratic tasks that I specially detest. Then, I was able to devote my efforts to Music in a more active way. Research and Art are two of the pillars that sustain the civilization.
After a study of the grounds of the music, in which I was mainly interested in the relationship between music and science, I wrote a History of the Symphony because this great genre was the most suitable to my concerns.
One of my first discoveries in the field of odorisation, the research specialty I was working in during my professional period, was to find a relationship between the abilities of smelling and hearing. A number of properties that are repeated in the field of these abilities, which generally are more developed among the women aged between 20 to 50 years.
Over the last eleven years I have devoted myself to write about the symphony, writing hundreds of pages and listening again and again thousands of works. In the section titled Secciones Especiales I present a detailed summary of my work at the current momento. However, it is such a wide scoped field, that I know that an exhaustive treatment is almost impossible.
My primary education was in French, a language in which I learned to read at the Lycée Français de Barcelona, a liberal school which my father, a man of conservative ideas, was not willing to accept. The secondary education was in the Escolapis de Balmes, which was completely counterproductive, leading me to claim my liberal ideas.
The other criticism is that one can accuse me of intrusion. I'm not a musician. The main reason is that I'm writing from the point of view of the audience, not of the musician. A work write by a fan for the fans, a work designed for people who have an intermediate or higher education, which may be not directly related to the field of music. This is not a work of a musician dedicated to their music colleges.
The decision to write this great work was motivated to don't find a satisfactory work about these subject. The History of the Symphony works that I was consulted were or divulging works of little value and very limited depth or specialized works, whit a language impossible to understood by the general public.
The main motivation for building this website is to preserve all this great work. I do not want these thousands of hours without any material compensation, to be lost in my demise from this world. All this work is closely connected with an important collection of recordings, that would be very interesting to preserve from its uncontrolled spread. Since I am unmarried with no direct descendants, I intend to leave my work to a cultural institution.
For any collaboration, clarification or consultation, contact the following email: